HHO Gas - Too good to be true?

[R.O.A]

Introduction video on Youtube

Ive just recently heard about this. Supposedly, there is a machine that can convert water into a gaseous form called HHO, and when said gas is heated it can be used to create a torch which is vastly more efficient than an acetylene torch. It all seems to good to be true, if this is real I think that there is likely a problem with this system that they are not talking about. Now honestly, I am not an engineer or a scientist so I don't know for sure if this is a plausible system or not. I thought that this would be a good place to start a thread about it. The only drawback that I can think of would be that if it isnt built properly, it can backfire, such as in this Video.

[General Zod]

This is apparently an old concept. With the problems mentioned on Snopes being the amount of energy required to convert the water is greater than the output you get, so it's basically bunk.

[CyrilsScribe]

Basic law of thermodynamics: you can not get more energy out of a system than you put it, my best guess is that the water is being separated into its two components of hydrogen and oxygen, not a completely new gas per say but an admixture of both elements. The only exception to the rule would be vacuum energy, but if they discovered that they would be much more famous.

[Spectre_nz]

Claiming you've figured out how to extract useful energy from water is to a chemist, like saying you've figured out how to travel faster than the speed of light to a physicist.
You're breaking the laws of chemistry to do it.

With any chemical reaction, you can look at the amount of energy bound up in the bonds of the starting material, and the amount of energy bound up in the end product and that will tell you if the reaction is going to produce energy or absorb it.

Combustion works the way it does because large, complex molecules are broken down into smaller, simpler ones that have a lot less energy tied up in them, and that energy difference is what comes out as heat and light when you set something on fire. Chemical reactions are all trying to 'roll down hill' to the lowest energy state they can. Water and Carbon dioxide are the final end product of hydrocarbon combustion because they're the lowest of the low. They're the bottom of the hill that all C, H and O containing reactants are trying to reach. If you want to do anything with water or carbon dioxide, you have to push them up hill as it were; supply energy to crack them.)

Every molecule anyone has ever thought about that you could produce with water has more energy. There's nothing you can react water into to make it roll down hill all on its own, unless you're reacting it with something that has so much energy to spare that it drags water along with it (like, say, sodium. That works because the energy liberated by the reacting sodium is enough to drive water apart in an 'up hill' reaction.

If there was a reaction we just hadn't thought of yet, odds are, the cosmos would have stumbled over it by now. Water is ubiquitous. If there was a reaction that liberated energy from water and produced something else, I am certain it would have happened en mass, we'd have no oceans and water wouldn't be the most abundant molecule in the cosmos.

Of course, if you're going to side step chemistry you can do it with physics... considering that it's more plausible for the HHO guys to get energy out of water via fusion than with some chemical trick, how plausible do you think it is that they've quietly cracked fusion?

edit: Ahh, this particular HHO crowd isn't claiming net energy production. Still, I don't know why they're bothering to associate with those 'power your car on water' HHO loons.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Introduction video on Youtube

Ive just recently heard about this. Supposedly, there is a machine that can convert water into a gaseous form called HHO, and when said gas is heated it can be used to create a torch which is vastly more efficient than an acetylene torch. It all seems to good to be true, if this is real I think that there is likely a problem with this system that they are not talking about. Now honestly, I am not an engineer or a scientist so I don't know for sure if this is a plausible system or not. I thought that this would be a good place to start a thread about it. The only drawback that I can think of would be that if it isnt built properly, it can backfire, such as in this Video.

Oh gods, not this bullshit again. It's another one of those perpetual motion/free energy nutjob things. Think about it, if you spend energy to break H2O into HHO and then burn it . . . you're not going to magically get more energy back than you spent in the electrolysis. In fact, all you will be doing is wasting energy, as you spend more energy in the electrolysis than you'd get back, and the car's engine can only convert 30% of the available thermal energy to useful work.

Frankly, understanding why this is bullshit doesn't even need college-level chemistry. Anyone who managed to not fail high school chemistry and physics ought to know that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

EDIT:

Oxyhydrogen torches do exist. And there are such torches that work by burning hydrogen and oxygen that have been produced through the electrolysis of water. However the chief reason such a torch/welder (connected to a DC power supply and a tank of water) would be considered useful is because you don't need to carry around a tank of highly flammable hydrogen. You make the hydrogen on-demand by electrolyzing it from the water.

[Surlethe]

You know, I started watching it, and my bullshit detector went off when he started welding things without a face plate. Isn't welding supposed to be really fucking will-blind-you-temporarily-and-cause-permanent-eye-damage bright? Or was I just premature on this one?

[Spectre_nz]

You know, I started watching it, and my bullshit detector went off when he started welding things without a face plate. Isn't welding supposed to be really fucking will-blind-you-temporarily-and-cause-permanent-eye-damage bright? Or was I just premature on this one?

All the brazing I've done was without a full face shield, generally just with tinted goggles, although depending on the work I could use clear safty goggles and squint if I felt like it.

Electric arc welding produces UV light and a shower of sparks, so you need full body protection for the sparks (leather apron, face shield) and a UV filter on your eye protection. Plus the flash is pretty bright so the tinting is rather extreme. Insufficent eye protection means Arc-eye... sunburn in your eyes basically.

Oxy-Acetylen isn't anywhere near as bright and there's no UV. The main reason for tinted goggles is so you can see detail, but if you're just applying silver solder to a joint, you can basically feel it out using the solder wire like a probe. Oxy-Acetly goggles have a much paler tint to them; you could see through them under normal indoor lights, unlike with an arc-welding mask.

Of course, you're not going to get any protection from the occasional spit or pop of material. You can work without goggles, with a gas torch if you're not worried about the fine details but I wouldn't want to.

[His Divine Shadow]

You know, I started watching it, and my bullshit detector went off when he started welding things without a face plate. Isn't welding supposed to be really fucking will-blind-you-temporarily-and-cause-permanent-eye-damage bright? Or was I just premature on this one?

My dad is a welder and he never uses a full faceplate unless he uses the electrical welder, with the gas welder only tinted glasses suffice.

[Modax]

This reminded me of a story from a few years back about a guy who discovered that saltwater will 'burn' if exposed to high intensity radio waves. Apparently it is a real phenomenon, but as mentioned, whatever energy is released isn't going to exceed the amount needed to produce those radio waves; something this WIRED article fails to mention.

[Steel]

This reminded me of a story from a few years back about a guy who discovered that saltwater will 'burn' if exposed to high intensity radio waves. Apparently it is a real phenomenon, but as mentioned, whatever energy is released isn't going to exceed the amount needed to produce those radio waves; something this WIRED article fails to mention.

That doesn't have to be true. You could get thousands of times the energy out of the salt water as the radio waves put in.

Consider oil: it burns if exposed to flame and you get a shedload more energy out than the match it took to light it.

The key thing is that energy produced is the difference in energy level of reactants and products, so without knowing the end state of the salt water we can't make any judgement (although there isnt much you can make thats at a lower state than its constituent parts for salt and water...)

[Winston Blake]

That doesn't have to be true. You could get thousands of times the energy out of the salt water as the radio waves put in.

Consider oil: it burns if exposed to flame and you get a shedload more energy out than the match it took to light it.

Because it's capable of combining with oxygen in the air to produce energy.

The key thing is that energy produced is the difference in energy level of reactants and products, so without knowing the end state of the salt water we can't make any judgement (although there isnt much you can make thats at a lower state than its constituent parts for salt and water...)

What? But we can know the end state of the salt water - itself. 'Burning' implies a chemical reaction, and there isn't anything in the air that will combine with saltwater to release energy. If there was, it would have been consumed by the oceans millennia ago. If the container is a reactant, then the container material is effectively your fuel. Saltwater will not burn unless the atmosphere suddenly transmutes into pure sodium gas or something.

I'm guessing that the 'burning saltwater' was actually just exotic electrolysis producing hydrogen, which then burnt.

[Korvan]

This reminded me of a story from a few years back about a guy who discovered that saltwater will 'burn' if exposed to high intensity radio waves. Apparently it is a real phenomenon, but as mentioned, whatever energy is released isn't going to exceed the amount needed to produce those radio waves; something this WIRED article fails to mention.

I saw a video on that. It was hilarious. They took the energy from the "burning water" and used it to power a small steam engine, getting maybe about 1 or two Watts of power out of it. If you looked carefully, you could see that the machine used to generate the radio waves was rated at 1500 Watts.

[Steel]

That doesn't have to be true. You could get thousands of times the energy out of the salt water as the radio waves put in.

Consider oil: it burns if exposed to flame and you get a shedload more energy out than the match it took to light it.

Because it's capable of combining with oxygen in the air to produce energy.

Yes, well done. How does this invalidate the point?

Obviously in the specific case of the salt water + radio waves, it isn't actually going to work (and I say as much in the next line), but in general saying 'lol got more energy out than you put in at the time must be fake' is wrong, because unless you account for all reactants and all products and their exact states you have not fully described the system and can make no reliable judgement.

For bonus points, what happens when you go from a bag of salt and a cup of water to salt in the water? No energy change? water warms up? Water cools down?

Have you heard of the concept of a catalyst? Something that you can add, and suddenly stuff starts happening, while your catalyst is left unchanged.*

*Catalyst may be slowly consumed by side reactions etc, but there exist many reactions that are made viable by the addition of some component that lowers activation energies (or whatever) for a stage of the reaction and allows it to proceed to completion while the extra component gets spat out again at the end.

[Winston Blake]

Obviously in the specific case of the salt water + radio waves, it isn't actually going to work (and I say as much in the next line), but in general saying 'lol got more energy out than you put in at the time must be fake' is wrong, because unless you account for all reactants and all products and their exact states you have not fully described the system and can make no reliable judgement.

This is a simple strawman. Modax was clearly referring to the phenomenon in question:

Apparently it is a real phenomenon, but as mentioned, whatever energy is released isn't going to exceed the amount needed to produce those radio waves; something this WIRED article fails to mention.

That's obviously not a general statement that exothermic reactions are impossible.

Obviously in the specific case of the salt water + radio waves, it isn't actually going to work

You could get thousands of times the energy out of the salt water as the radio waves put in.

What exactly is your position supposed to be? If you're not arguing that radio waves and saltwater 'could' produce useful energy, then you did a good job of pretending you were.

[Steel]

What exactly is your position supposed to be? If you're not arguing that radio waves and saltwater 'could' produce useful energy, then you did a good job of pretending you were.

No mechanism, no knowledge of reactants/products: no defined answer.

You could get thousands of times the energy out of the salt water as the radio waves put in.

Apparatus: 1 1mW radio transmitter and receiver, 1 motorised arm, 1 bag of salt, 1 water bath.

When the transmitter is turned on the arm pours the salt into the water at a rate of 60g/s, producing a power output of 10kW.

Obviously in the specific case of the salt water + radio waves, it isn't actually going to work

Means that unless its a contrived situation like above it isn't going to do anything helpful. We can conclude this from considering actual possible chemistry and mechanisms, not just making a blanket statement "CoE and we're done".

I'm saying the answer isn't this is useless because it cant produce power above the power the radio waves put in, but this is useless because it has no mechanism by which is could. The "but as mentioned" phrase seemed to me to indicate that Modax was referring to the previous examples in the thread (where there were specified mechanisms showing how nothing useful was done) and taking that as a general principle of 'local' energy conservation.

If nobody is actually confused about this issue then I apologise and this is a fairly useless tangent.

[Hamstray]

Introduction video on Youtube

Wow, O-H-O: that is just so awesomely retarded. Can't bear the chest pains.

[Winston Blake]

What exactly is your position supposed to be? If you're not arguing that radio waves and saltwater 'could' produce useful energy, then you did a good job of pretending you were.

No mechanism, no knowledge of reactants/products: no defined answer.

And the point of positing radical, unknown mechanisms and unimaginable reactants/products is what exactly? It's a pointless nitpick of an argument that never existed.

You could get thousands of times the energy out of the salt water as the radio waves put in.

Apparatus: 1 1mW radio transmitter and receiver, 1 motorised arm, 1 bag of salt, 1 water bath.

When the transmitter is turned on the arm pours the salt into the water at a rate of 60g/s, producing a power output of 10kW.

This has nothing to do with saltwater 'burning' when exposed to radio waves, and you know it. You admit later that it's intentionally contrived.

Obviously in the specific case of the salt water + radio waves, it isn't actually going to work

Means that unless its a contrived situation like above it isn't going to do anything helpful. We can conclude this from considering actual possible chemistry and mechanisms, not just making a blanket statement "CoE and we're done".

I'm saying the answer isn't this is useless because it cant produce power above the power the radio waves put in, but this is useless because it has no mechanism by which is could. The "but as mentioned" phrase seemed to me to indicate that Modax was referring to the previous examples in the thread (where there were specified mechanisms showing how nothing useful was done) and taking that as a general principle of 'local' energy conservation.

So you interpreted 'as mentioned' to mean:

• 'because of previous examples, all exothermic reactions are impossible, derp',

rather than:

• 'similar to previous examples, there is no useful mechanism here'.

You have to admit that's a bit of a stretch.

If nobody is actually confused about this issue then I apologise and this is a fairly useless tangent.

I agree, it's just creating clutter.

[General Trelane (Retired)]

Back to the OP, this sounds like so-called "Brown's Gas", which has been around for a while. It's been thoroughly debunked time and time again, yet there are morally bankrupt people still peddling these torches as the ultimate for welding and cutting. Some of them even claim the flame implodes!